Price management tools are essential to build your business’s pricing initiatives. However, establishing these tools are not as easy as you think. We’ll be discussing four areas you’ll need to consider for price support. These tips will enable you to build a high-performance pricing team and culture, as well as guide you through your price improvement program or a wide-scale business transformation.

 


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Tips For Utilising Your Price Management Tools

 

Think of this article as a price management tools fact sheet for leaders and managers. When considering a new hire or promotion, refer to these tips to ensure you make the best pricing and team decisions and drive superior price management practices.

 

 

Price Management Tools

 

Price Management Tools – Tip #1

Avoid placing unspecialised employees in pricing positions

 

A large number of managers put staff forward for pricing a role or team that they are completely unsuited for. Overconfidence is a problem for managers who need more price support.  Our research shows most managers are unable to objectively judge their own pricing skills and capability with limited price management tools.

 

For instance, many managers simply rely on impressions to predict their suitability and fit for pricing roles. In effect, these false perceptions lead to disaster as employees struggle to fill roles without the right specialised knowledge. In conclusion, hiring or promoting people based on personal preferences, tenure, or perceived time and resource constraints rarely turns out well.

 

 

Price Management Tools – Tip #2

Avoid unproven frameworks and competency models

 

The promotion process for price and commercial leadership roles is often set up to fail before it even begins. Our research shows that over 70% of HR managers rely on a generic Lominger (Korn Ferry) framework to understand pricing roles. However, Lominger provides limited to no price support and insight into the characteristics of commercial price leadership.

 

Lominger is a well-known brand for HR functions – best suited for more standardised accountancy roles.  This framework struggles to define the pricing competencies, skills, and behaviours required to be successful in a price leadership role.

 

Not using a proven price support framework will create role ambiguity and confusion amongst teams about how they should access and feed into the pricing function.

 

Price Management Tools – Tip #3

Avoid generic tests to determine fit

 

Most business leaders are not armed with any price support data or analytics when they assign people to pricing teams. Furthermore, they use the wrong data to determine candidate fit and suitability for pricing roles without even realising it.

 

Our research shows that generic aptitude testing provides zero price support to leaders. Aptitude tests like SHL aptitude testing and standard psychometrics struggle to measure and identify the right people for high performing pricing teams.

 

Generic tests were never designed to measure pricing skills, competencies and potential in the first place. CVs and Standard assessment tools often delay recruiting processes and overlook high quality candidates more suited to pricing roles.

 

 

Price Management Tools – Tip #4

Avoid placing the right people in the wrong positions

 

The wrong team structure offers good teams limited price support and defeats high performers every time. Our research shows that when a business experiences a series of implementation mistakes or new hires repeatedly fail in their role, it’s actually a sign of limited price support and structural imbalance rather than bad hires.

 

Legacy team structures are often misaligned to strategy or execution, creating confusion amongst teams and roles. Price decision-making bottlenecks within power structures and simply slow implementation all around. Teams have zero price support. Organisations lose hard-earned margins.

 

Price Management Tools

 

 

Implications

Only 1 in 100 managers demonstrate the fluidity of thinking, imagination and domain expertise.

 

These tips facts will not only save you money now and in the long run – they will help you see who stands out from the crowd before your competitors. Most managers are better at solving basic to intermediate financial reasoning problems than real world commercial pricing problems. However, there are significant gaps in capability across the board, including basic financial reasoning and data interpretation.

 

One of the biggest pain points for managers is dealing with people with opposing styles or beliefs to them. For instance, many chose to withdraw and avoid conflict. Diversity and inclusion issues are impacting culture and profitability.

 

Don’t just rely on CVs and interviews or past success to assign people to pricing teams. Instead, use an evidence-driven approach to back up your decisions and feelings about someone.

 

Price Management Tools

 


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Conclusion

 

If you want to know how good someone is at pricing and revenue management, get them to take our pricing and commercial assessment. Additionally, this will allow you to benchmark their performance against relative industries.

 

It’s better to know whether someone’s going to be a good fit before they are placed in the role. They’ll appreciate getting constructive advice on their skills and development. Likewise, your hires will also get a good insight into commercial pricing and the challenges and outcomes. This gives them a better understanding of what they’ll be expected to achieve in their new role.

 

In summary, don’t just see recruitment as a method to fill seats quickly. Instead, think of recruitment as a great opportunity to educate and engage future employees about the role, as well as the mission of pricing inside your business.

 

For many firms, talent has been mostly intuitive and biased. What actions will you take to de-bias these decisions?

 

About Taylor Wells Pty Ltd.

 

Taylor Wells is an Australian talent advisory and recruitment firm whose sole focus and dedication are supporting leaders build high-performance pricing teams.

 

“We’ve worked with some of the biggest brands in Australia, and we partner with subject matter experts to help us integrate pricing teams within businesses efficiently.

 

We have undertaken over 2000 assessments from pricing professionals in Australia and globally. We’ve studied a range of pricing performance factors to define competencies, characteristics and profiles that work best for each given role.

 

We continually strive to optimise the pricing teambuilding and team integration process to improve organisational pricing capability. We strongly believe that combining data-driven insights with industry pricing knowledge and specialisation, can help businesses improve their pricing capability in much shorter time frames and with minimal cost and disruption.

 

Our proprietary teambuilding process drives early team performance, helping new teams forge 1-2% additional margin in their first 6-12 months.”

 

– Joanna Wells, Director of Taylor Wells

 


For a comprehensive view on building a great pricing team to prevent loss in revenue,

Download a complimentary whitepaper on How to Build Hiring Capability To Get The Best Pricing Team.

 

Are you a business in need of help to align your pricing strategy, people and operations to deliver an immediate impact on profit?

If so, please call (+61) 2 9000 1115.

You can also email us at team@taylorwells.com.au if you have any further questions.

Make your pricing world class!